'The Struggle Is Real' at Orlando Fringe Festival

Laugh with us through time as Runaways explore the struggle through sketch. Real women. Real comedy. Don't touch that dial.

Laugh with us through time as Runaways explore the struggle through sketch. Real women. Real comedy. Don't touch that dial.

Lania Berger

Indeed, yes, the struggle is real ... the struggle I am having to put together the theme or message of this sketch comedy show.

It starts out promising: Rebecca Walters invites us to embark on a ride of the future. She’s dressed in a white lab coat, and her voice sounds like the introduction to a ride at Epcot. She is describing the Human Experience Ride (HER), and informs us that we will see women in different places in time. And that is the only motif I can identify. Women. Which is far too broad a topic.

And in the multitude of sketches that follow, we do, although they are extremely random and don’t always make sense. One is at the gates of heaven, another is on a monorail to places called Jean-Town and CoffeeWineVille. We go to the Safety Commission of the National Education Association, the Disney princesses’ group-therapy session, and even Rydell High where Danny asks Sandy to go the sock hop.

The Fringe Factor: Some sketches have promise. There is one that we see a few times about a robot called the Argument Preventer 3000. Because we return to this story several times, it has a chance to develop and capture the audience’s attention. Rather than featuring so many short and seemingly meaningless sketches, it might be more effective to pick the strongest and further develop those concepts to give the show a stronger backbone.

Curtain Call: The Human Experience Ride (HER) was described as providing a “never-ending loop of human experience.” Unfortunately, that’s about how it felt — neverending.